I had another project fall into my lap this summer. I ended up purchasing it off of a friend who didn't really have the time to finish it off. I had seen the car in late 2014 when I purchased the RB20 engine mounts for my Golddust project. I immediately fell in love with the clean white car and the aggressive wheels. At that time the car still had a stock NA SR20DE and R180 diff and rear subframe. The original owner talked about doing an RB25 swap and was, naturally, quite interested in the RB26 swap I was undertaking. He pulled the SR and swapped in an R200 diff/rear subframe in preparation for an RB25 swap but had to let the car go due to some changing priorities.

Fast forward to June 2016 and I was headed to Abbotsford with truck & trailer to drag home another old Nissan! We came upon the car sitting in a field and immediately had to get it!

When I picked the car up, I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. If the car was a basket case, I could swap all the cool kouki bits and aero onto Golddust and part it out. This would also require paint and bodywork on Golddust which I was not interested in. To my surprise, the car was in way better shape than Golddust. I washed Silvia and parked it in the far reaches of the shop and dreamed of various options for the Silvia over the summer. I initially thought of just doing a quick and dirty KA24DE to get it going but the car was too nice to justify that. I toyed with the idea of LS2 power but was discouraged by the price of T56 transmissions and the fact that it would not be in the family. I thought about VH45 V8 power (my coffee table) but I didn't really want to go down that path.

After putting about 5000km on Golddust this summer, I was in love with the RB/S chassis combo so I decided to go that direction. It was something that I knew how to do and it kept the engine in the family. In mid October another buddy called and told me that I should buy his RB25DET engine set so he could focus on other things. I couldn't have said yes fast enough on the phone!

Wheels:Currently Niche Targa 18x9.5 + 40 with 1.5" spacers (effective +2) 215/35 and 225/40 tiresI'd like to be able to run 17x9+30 R33 GTR rims with a square setup of 255/40 but that may come laterThe current tires are toast. I would like to run square 235/35/18 on the Targas.

Suspension:Currently has a full suite of cheap ebay arms and Kei Office front and Tein rear coilovers. I will re-spring the coilovers and try to make the most of them for now. I will run with the cheap arms for now and likely upgrade select arms to GKTech later on (RUCA, rear toe). I plan to modify the rear traction arms to match Nismo spec.

Given that I had a clean white canvas to start with, I had to pick a contrasting color to go with it. I ended up choosing Illusion Violet (4514) from Prismatic Powders. It's only a 2 stage so it saves some time compared to the 3 stage candy red I've been doing. The plan is to do purple valvecovers, diff cover, brakes, a couple other small things.

Upon getting the engine home, I stripped the whole hot side in preparation for new exhaust manifold studs (3 were broken off from manifold stress on cyl. 5/6). After undoing all of the manifold nuts that remained, the manifold wouldn't budge. I double nutted and extracted stud by stud until only 2 remained. The manifold still wouldn't budge. Finally, I got down to one stud and the manifold came off. Now I had 4 broken studs to deal with. I drilled the studs and extracted them without issue using a SnapOn bolt extractor. What a stressful process that was!With all the studs removed, I chased the threads and ordered new studs.

All the stress in the manifold had caused a crack between cylinder 2 and 3. I had it repaired and the manifold decked and some of the mounting holes elongated to eliminate the stress that held in on before.

Did a spring inventory to find a good option for this car. Measured some D, d, N and L and ran some calcs. I'm very happy with the 11kg/mm/9k springs in Golddust. I ended up replacing the 7k front springs with 10k springs and getting everything freed up. Hopefully the shocks can handle the 10k springs. I haven't looked at the rear yet.

I bought a pair of Brembo 17Z calipers off a Porsche Cayenne a year and a bit ago but I ended up selling them since there is excessive mounting ear interference between the knuckle and caliper when used on a 350Z Brembo rotor (324x30). The calipers are 6 piston forged monoblocks with 6 titanium pistons! The kid I sold the calipers to made them work on 370Z Akebono rotors (355mm!) which had me intrigued. The problem with such a large rotor is that the pad coverage becomes an issue since the large rotor does not fit inside the caliper designed for 330mm rotors. I had drawn the caliper back in 2015 but decided to try a little harder this time around. I created a database of a bunch of different rotors until I found one that met the following criteria:1. minimal caliper ear interference (read: maximize rotor diameter)2. minimize rotor clearance mods required on 17Z calipers3. maximum size to still fit in R33 GTR rims (17x9 ET30)4. off the shelf rotor with minimal mods required

Thanks guys! I've drooled over the Kouki S14s for years now so this has been a long time coming. I thought a lot about going for candy red (Eric Straw style) but thought this would be an interesting colour combo too. Glad you like it as well.

Duke, I've wanted a white car for years. If Golddust was painted, it would likely get a white job as well!

Pops and I got a little 11" swing metal lathe last summer so I wired it up this past weekend so I could open up the center hole on my exhaust flanges. I drew them all nice prior to waterjet cutting but I neglected to actually dimension the middle hole. A few minutes on the lathe and all is well.

A Wiring Specialties Pro harness is on its way along with some miscellaneous OEM parts, electric fan, front control arm bushings, custom braided brake/clutch lines. Pretty soon I'll have all the bits to put all the last bits together.

Curious - since you've been playing with the RB motors quite a bit, do you feel this is an equally good swap compared to the Toyota J2Z swap in stock form? From the installation and electrics side of making the RB work, how do you feel about the complexity of the swap? I know you add lots of nice looking components, but the swap itself - what is really involved to make the ECU work and package run like it should?

The RBs are really lovely engines but they have a bad rap -mostly for oil pump failures. From what I've read about them, it seems that many failures are due to fatigue stresses in the oil pump gear when at the rev limiter. That combined with a narrow oil pump drive can often be catastrophic. With that aside, they're pretty fun out of the box and sound great. I'm going to run mine with fingers crossed.

The 2JZ has sequential turbos so it would be a bit of a job to get that all working but probably no worse than an RB26. Costs for both RB26s and 2JZs are skyrocketing. Bank on spending $5-$7K+ for a decent engine set. In a perfect world, 2JZs would go in LHD cars and RBs into RHD cars so the hot side is opposite the drivers side.

For both the 2JZ and RB25/6, you can wire them up yourself with some time and wiring ability or buy a swap harness. I went with the latter this time in the interest of time. I would love some extra displacement but it's tough to justify the cost of an RB30 block from Australia. Maybe one day...

Here in the southern coast of Oregon, RB's are impossible to find and 2JZ's can only be found in the Lexus SC300. The only six cylinder that I find of interest are the BMW n54's. How would you say they(n54) compare to the more popular and harder to find rb/2jz?